fantasy and faith

That's the title of homeschooling mom, Sally Thomas' piece in First Things on Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time-- written after L'Engle's death last year and given the impact of that book on Thomas.

For me, this extends a topic I've posted on lately-- and allows me to bring attention to a good book I read (and mutually enjoyed) with my older two boys a few months ago....

The winter I was ten, my teacher read A Wrinkle in Time aloud to our class, a chapter a day. It was, in my view, the sole reason for getting up and going to school. I loved the novel’s Meg Murry, a girl neither beautiful nor graceful nor socially gifted—yet entrusted with a dangerous and salvific mission. She was an icon of unlikely heroic potential for bespectacled girls everywhere, and I was no exception....

The novels of Madeleine L’Engle that I read in those awkward transitional years of late elementary school and junior high—chiefly A Wrinkle in Time, over and over, and its first sequel, A Wind in the Door—answered some deep longing in me for there to be more to the universe than meets the eye. The idea of cherubim and other supernatural “Servants,” the idea that there might really be angels and that they wouldn’t be fat babies with wings, but something as unimaginable and terrifying as they were good, was compelling and new to me. I devoured those novels even as I devoured the Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, not because they satisfied my inchoate yearning for something beyond the world I knew, but because they stoked it....

L’Engle bridled at being labeled a “children’s author” and insisted that she would not “write down” to her audience....She was willing, as most children’s authors are not, to engage ideas both challenging and strange in the world of children’s books. The tesseract, for instance—the conceit around which A Wrinkle in Time revolves—derives from geometry and describes a four-dimensional construction consisting of three conjoined cubes. Other novels deal with kything, a form of intuitive and extra-verbal communication that can transport the practitioner, in his mind, into other times, places, and bodies....

Not insignificantly, L’Engle also bridled at being labeled a Christian writer, preferring instead to be known as “a writer who is struggling to be a Christian.” Any artist’s resistance to religious pigeonholing is understandable, especially when the pigeonhole is already full of substandard efforts raised to a dubious level of art by virtue of being “religious.”...

L’Engle’s protagonists are called from their nets to follow; they do so with fear and grumbling and little vision in the beginning for what is at stake or the grace they will need in the end....

Michael O’Brien categorizes L’Engle’s work as “good on the surface, but fundamentally disordered,” operating from a theological base that is gnostic and neopagan instead of Christian. L’Engle, a lifelong communicant in the Episcopal Church, often made declarations of belief that tend toward a theological fuzziness...

But we are talking about children’s literature....The question remains, I suppose, of whether the deeper theological problems that are arguably in L’Engle’s work render it dangerous to the spiritual formation of children.

My intuitive answer is no, though I base that intuition on the simple, anecdotal, and utterly unreliable basis of my own reading of them....What these novels provided me with was something I cannot remember having possessed before I encountered them: a religious imagination. Perhaps I should have been reading them through the lens of the Bible; instead, as a teenager, I turned anew to the Bible with these stories alive in my mind....

The novels themselves were not the gospel, and I don’t think I ever mistook them as such. But they awakened my mind to the idea of a universe in which, even in distant galaxies, God is praised in the familiar words of the Psalms...